Three Properties, Three Spreadsheets, One Sunday Afternoon
The Sunday afternoon
Three properties. One is on Airbnb and Booking.com, one is mostly direct because it has its own regulars, one came with a managing agent who sends a PDF. Three calendars, three payout schedules, two currencies, and a spreadsheet you rebuild every month because last month’s version has a formula in it you no longer trust.
The spreadsheet is not the problem. The problem is that it can only ever tell you what already happened, and it takes a Sunday to find that out.
One axis, every property
Stacked on one axis, because the comparison people actually want is between properties and against the total — not three charts side by side with three different scales, which is how you end up believing Studio 3 is doing better than it is.
Two things fall out immediately.
Villa 1 is 60% of the portfolio. Not a surprise on its own, but worth knowing precisely before you spend a refurbishment budget on Studio 3 because it “feels like it needs the help”.
Every property peaks in the same month. July is 9,100 of a 67,800 year. The portfolio is not diversified; it is the same seasonal bet placed three times. That is a perfectly reasonable position to hold, and a bad one to hold by accident.
| Property | Year | Share | Peak month | Quietest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Villa 1 | 40,200 | 59% | Jul — 5,400 | Feb — 1,700 |
| Cottage 2 | 19,400 | 29% | Jul — 2,600 | Feb — 800 |
| Studio 3 | 8,200 | 12% | Jul — 1,100 | Feb — 300 |
| Portfolio | 67,800 | 100% | Jul — 9,100 | Feb — 2,800 |
Example figures from a demo account. The properties are invented, and so are the numbers.
The number a spreadsheet never has
Everything above is history, and history is the easy half. The portfolio view also carries forward pipeline — confirmed bookings with a check-in date that has not arrived yet, which is the closest thing a short-term rental has to a revenue forecast.
It is the figure most hosts cannot produce on demand, because it is not in the accounts (nothing has been invoiced) and it is not in last month’s spreadsheet (it has not happened). It lives only in the calendar, spread across three of them.
Knowing in September that January is 40% booked against 65% at the same point last year is the difference between adjusting a rate in October and discovering the problem in February.
What else is on that page
Currency breakdown, if you take money in more than one — with what was agreed kept separate from what your books are in, because those are two different questions and conflating them is how a portfolio quietly loses a few percent a year.
Profit and costs, if you have connected your accounting. Income is not profit, and a portfolio view that only shows income will happily tell you your worst property is your second best.
Per-organisation scoping. If you manage properties across separate entities, the page tells you which entity you are looking at rather than silently aggregating. A total that spans two companies is not a number anyone can use.
What these reports need. Every chart here is built from bookings Airflow can see. A channel it cannot read is a channel missing from the picture, and a report with a hole in it is worse than no report — so the pages say what they are missing rather than quietly averaging it away. The profit and reconciliation views need a connected ledger; without one you get income, not profit.
See it on your own numbers
Everything above is one demo account. The version that matters is the one built from your bookings, and it takes about twenty minutes to get there:
- Create an account — start free; a card is needed at sign-up.
- Import your history. Paste your Airbnb or Booking.com iCal link, or upload a CSV export. Past bookings come in too, which is what makes the first chart worth looking at on day one rather than in six months.
- Connect your accounting, if you keep books in Xero. That is what turns the income charts into profit charts, and it is what makes the reconciliation view work at all.
- Open Stats. Property tab for one place, Overview for the portfolio.
Related: A Booking Is a Thing at a Time, Thirty Emails or One, and Import Airbnb Booking History into Xero.